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b) IT: IT provides the back office support for the committee. It is its responsibility to provide a Project Manager, Data Modeler, Data Integration Lead, BI Front-End Lead, and Enterprise Architect and Trainer Lead. The project manager will be the facilitator for the committee, making sure the meetings take place at the right place, right time and with the right people. The Data Modeler will be in charge of creating a data model that supports the business needs. It will be the Data Integration Lead’s responsibility to implement the appropriate data integration framework to populate the data model. The BI Front-End Lead will interact heavily with the business users to define the report and standards to follow. The Enterprise Architect will keep the solution in check with Enterprise Standards. The Trainer Lead will be responsible for creating the material that will be used to train the trainers, and thus create an infrastructure to train the user universe in a quick and effective manner.

c) CFO Office: As BI projects are considered strategic in nature and depending on the implementation cost can easily escalate to millions of dollars, it is recommended to have a direct link to the CFO in the BI Governance committee. This will facilitate the prioritization of projects, based on alignment to the corporate strategy (ies) and Return On Investment (ROI), at the same time that provides an opportunity to the team to justify the infrastructure and development costs directly to the ultimate approver.

As outline above, every group of stakeholders needs to play a role and commit to some responsibilities in order to establish BI Governance. The picture below outlines how the different groups interact through the life cycle of a BI initiative (Figure 3).

Figure 3 - Stakeholder’s major roles and responsibilities through the life cycle of a BI initiative